Michael Morris

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General Information

B.S. 2006   M.S. 2008   

What They Have To Say

I am a double graduate of the OU School of Meteorology (BS - 2006, MS - 2008) and currently work for First Wind, LLC in Newton, Massachusetts as a Wind Resource Analyst. We are currently among the leading producers of renewable energy in New England. My day to day activities include: Project Energy Projections - predicting long-term what the wind farm will produce given the turbine layout, model (or models), and the estimated long-term wind climate at the site.?Data Processing and Analysis - QA data from some of my company's met towers (kind of like what the Mesonet QA folks do)?Operational Performance Assessment - explaining any discrepancy in wind farm production versus the original estimate, based on things like site-wide wind variablility and turbine performance issues.

Because the field I work in has been dominated largely by engineers since its early days in the 1970's, I feel that a meteorological perspective is necessary to understand some of the phenomena we often observe in complex terrain. During my time at OU I became familiar with a wide variety of instrumentation platforms and have been able to make suggestions that we believe will provide much greater accuracy in our pre-construction measurement campaigns. A solid understanding of microscale, mesoscale, and boundary layer principles is also extremely important when prospecting for new installations, especially in the western US and Hawaii. Finally, since the industry is so competitive, having the ability to automate routine analyses and tasks with tools and programming concepts I learned at OU has made myself and the other members of my group far more productive and able to produce energy assessments for developers and upper management in a more timely fashion.